LISBON.- The present exhibition is a rare historical opportunity: it reveals to us unknown parts of the artist’s work (projects created from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, but never built until now).
A concentration on painting, as well as a number of equally important issues connected with the art market (or its lack…), have conditioned the public evolution of Manuel Baptista’s work. In spite of not being the ones through which the artist created his image, the pieces now displayed share their subjects and forms with many of the drawings and paintings he would exhibit over the past decades: their key elements are bushes and trees, windows with landscapes, formal patterns based on elements drawn from nature, monochromatic paintings and shaped canvases, objects that become abstract as they are used to structure the compositions (fans, shirts, ties…).
The display of some of the countless notebooks that sustain Manuel Baptista’s visual thinking allows us to follow his development, create connections or grasp the extent of common ground between representation in painting and drawing and a longing for sculpture. These notebooks make up a gigantic database, a kind of cartoon encyclopaedia of Manuel Baptista’s visual wisdom. There, abstract experiments alternate with figurative depictions. It is from the latter that Manuel Baptista draws his sculptural concepts, but never in a realistic or naturalistic sense: forms and scales simplify or complexify contours and volumes, defining decorative interplays of colours, materials and textures.
Generally timeless everyday objects (envelopes, shirts with ties, tables…), elements taken from natural and/or landscaped settings (bushes, cliffs, bunches of flowers) and certain objects with symbolic value (balls of wool), along with some organic but derivative forms made from common materials (graduated rulers), make up the body of work shown here.
Fifty drawings dated from 1969 to 1974 (with a few later incursions up to 2005) illustrate the persistence of the subjects and, even more significantly, the degree of transference and/or overlapping between sketches and projects, autonomous two-dimensional works and, finally, the finished sculptures.
What might be considered most important about this exhibition is the change in terms of factual data it brings to Portuguese art history. After an isolated experiment in recovering one of his sculptural projects (Anos 60 - Década de Ruptura, Palácio Galveias, Lisbon, 1994, curated by António Rodrigues), Manuel Baptista joins now the ranks of artists who, like Ângelo de Sousa (2006, in Lisbon, at the Gulbenkian Modern Art Centre and at Cordoaria Nacional, curated by Nuno Faria) or Jorge Pinheiro (at the Gulbenkian Modern Art Centre in 2001, and in Porto in 2010, at Galeria Fernando Santos), had the opportunity to build or reveal an impressive group of sculptural objects from the 1960s and 1970s in Portugal.
In terms of subjects, materials and scale, Manuel Baptista’s pieces have affinities with the Western art of their time. We are facing a new kind of conceptual situation, which must be taken into consideration in historical terms. Proof of that can be found in the desire to experiment with materials present in his projects, in the refusal of noble materials, in the use of industrial materials (neon lights, aluminium, plywood, Plexiglas, fibreglass…), in the intention to simplify contours and volumes, in the association of line and volume, non-illustrative colour and non-naturalistic form, in the presentation of sculptural pieces as non-monuments. Otherwise, the simple fact that there is a tendency to change the scale of all represented objects, with the reduction of what is gigantic (the cliffs, for instance) and the enlargement of what is naturally small or made to be handled (the shirts, for instance), would be enough to show that these pieces would be highly innovative in their historical time.
However, the everyday life they evoke is intimate and cultivated: the restraint and tonal ranging of the colours, alongside parallel references to the natural and artisanal spheres, invalidate any facile associations with Pop Art. We must surmise that their approach stems from a mind influenced by the critical poetics of Arte Povera and Nouveau Réalisme, and also by its reception and understanding of the peculiar Portuguese political, social and technologic situation from whence it emerged and to which it returned.
The work Manuel Baptista now presents brings into the present a time past; it can be understood, absorbed or made productive today if seen as an ‘over-sculpture’, a work of reflection and practice on a genre, dislocation of some basic meanings of the representation of reality (such as the excessive scales), a feeling of strangeness, even in recognisable items (the table that stretches across space, for instance). We must try to understand it in the drifting and plural context of our present: thus Manuel Baptista’s sculptures will be able to recover the euphoric ambition, joyous humour and genuine happiness that attended their conception.
MANUEL BAPTISTA was born in Faro in 1936. He departed to Lisbon in 1957, where he studied Architecture at ESBAL (Escola Superior de Belas Artes de Lisboa). In the same year, he presented his first solo exhibition at Círculo Cultural do Algarve, Faro. In 1962, he concluded the Complementary Painting Course at ESBAL, and then went to Paris with a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Grant, remaining there until 1963. In 1968 he lived in Ravenna, Italy, thanks to a Grant from Instituto de Alta Cultura. He was an Assistant Professor of Painting at ESBAL from 1964 to 1972. He did his first work of public art in 1971, when the Portuguese Section of AICA invited him to participate in the redecoration of the “A Brasileira” coffeehouse. From 1977 to 1980 he travelled regularly to Lippstadt and Schmallenberg, in the Federal Republic of Germany, where he worked. In 1988, he presented his first retrospective exhibition of drawing and painting (1956-1988), at the Espírito Santo Convent, in Loulé. A second retrospective of painting (1963-1990) was held at SNBA (Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes), Lisbon. Finally, his first anthological exhibition took place in 1996, at Casa da Cerca – Centro De Arte Contemporânea, Almada. Between 1990 and 2003, he directed the Municipal Galleries of Faro (Trem and Arco).
